Saturday, May 11, 2013

Learned the art of making edible and "safe" chicken curry while I was living in Chennai. This was fairly easy due to a very ingenious invention called the pressure cooker. However, I haven't been able to make chicken curry that way for a very long time; ever since I've moved to Bangalore.

But a few weeks back I met a woman; she was someone who has a future plan of being a chef (which I wasn't aware of at the time) asked me if I knew how to cook. And me being modest and all said "I only know how to make chicken curry".

Thus unfolded a whole chain of events...and I ended up explaining her the method anyway.

Most IT folks would be aware of the term BSOD (aka blue screen of death). Its just a blue screen you get when windows encounters an error. You'd normally see a blue screen with some text which is dumped onto the screen. At a time when Windows 98 was in vogue, everything about that operating system was slow, but this was known to happen super fast.

My recipe came out even faster than that.

However, how that conversation ensued was even more embarrassing...

To explain I'll need to share a bit of the preparation technique: you saute onions in a kadai, add chopped tomatoes to make it somewhat consistent, then you add your spices, then you add your chicken and other vegetables. After you feel the spices has been absorbed by the mix. You just dump the whole thing into a pressure cooker for one whistle.

I never get it right however. You need to proportion your spices correctly to get the magic, if you know what I mean.

But most people do it the hard way. They actually use the kadai for the whole preparation. The pressure cooker is faster, and much easier to manage. And I find that the probability of such people (in that particular age group) not knowing that you could use a pressure cooker to cook chicken curry, is very high. The other person. to my surprise, was actually listening...

By all means I wanted to stop the narration, but I just went on...at the end of it was a strange emotion.

I was thinking to myself, "Hey maybe I'll ask you for my Nobel prize for that narration later... but really?! You never knew you could use the damn pressure cooker!!!"

Then I was feeling a sense of accomplishment: "So I have successfully pressure cookerized another soul"

Then the most awkward thing happens:

She asks: "Why use the kadai?!"

Then I thought, "Yeah sure, the straight answer to that was - to mix the spices. But why couldn't I do it in the pressure cooker before putting all the chicken? The chicken had to go in there anyway..."

The embarrassing bit is...in all my 3+ yrs since I knew how to make...I never asked myself this question!

So naturally where was the answer?! I paused for a while shrugged and said, "I never really had that much of kitchen sense", and smiled.

Days later I when I started reflecting on myself, who really handed me down the recipe; it turns out that my mother and sister both don't use the kadai for preparation. Now this was getting seriously like WTF.

There is only one person responsible for all this. and I am sure to whack him the next time I meet him. :)

Ps: on a serious note, never ever invite me over to your place for preparing chicken curry. You kitchen is not a lab; and I am not a chef.

Oh I dunno. I suppose it was a woman about 5 ft 3ish,..plump...can't say fair (because it was very dark)...probably has the avatar of a respectable woman zoo keeper tending to young elephants (i.e. aana kuttis) holding an AK-47 rifle (you know, in case they misbehave), being a crazy malayalee pennu (stuck in bangalore) with ambitions of becoming Master Chef Kerala one day by stunning the world making sambar and thayiru curry (rajinikanth style)...